Humans are Playing God by physically and metaphorically perfecting themselves. Beauty is currently at an all time climax, allowing this project to explore what lies beyond perfection.

Scary Beautiful challenges current beauty ideals by inflicting an unexpected new beauty standard.

There's more:

The project Scary beautiful was nominated for the Gerrit Rietveld design prize. Here follows the Jury report of jury members Barbara Visser, visual artist and Xander Karskens, curator of De Hallen :

"The object created by Leanie expands the concept of a shoe into multiple new meanings. The beautifully made leather object is accompanied by a video registration of a girl wearing it. One observes the design forcing the wearer to develop a new way of walking, leaning forward while refining a painfully fragile balance. The jury applauds the way aesthetics, ergonomics and prosthesis merge into an awkward choreography. The craftsmanship and strong conceptual way of designing also show in another work, a ceramic tea set in which reference is made to a building in South Africa. Leanie succeeds in translating political consciousness into form and is considered by the jury to be a meaningful future designer."

it's not like you're likely to see these on runways soon. i can't imagine this is anything but design as critique.

if architecture is getting more critical - meaning some architecture being produced critiques the profession or the status quo - that may be a good thing. it's likely only to happen as paper architecture, though, because who can afford to build something that's just for the purpose of critique?

...unless it transcends that job and becomes something else! that's the primary job of a critical architecture. most famously, corb's work was a direct critique of what he saw AND a proposition for how to make something better for his time.

so, back to your analogy: are these shoes both a critique and a proposition for better? no. but, unfortunately, i don't see much architectural work now that is even this direct or apparent a criticism of the status quo. instead of critique, we get baroque. where the analogy works, though, is that in both cases the proposals are definitely different. they just seldom point to a better set of solutions for future work.